Abstract

(BST) thick films with thickness up to were deposited on Pt-coated silicon substrates by ion beam sputtering, followed by an annealing treatment. It is demonstrated that pure well-crystallized perovskite phase could be obtained in thick BST films by a low temperature process . The BST thick films show highly tunable dielectric properties with tunability (at 800 kV/cm) up to 51.0% and 66.2%, respectively, for the 0.5 and thick films. The relationship between strains and dielectric properties was systematically investigated in the thick films. The results suggest that a comparatively larger tensile thermal in-plane strain (0.15%) leads to the degradation in dielectric properties of the thick film; besides, strong defect-related inhomogeneous strains make the dielectric peaks smearing and broadening in the thick films, which, however, preferably results in high figure-of-merit factors over a wide operating temperature range. Moreover, the leakage current behavior in the BST thick films was found to be dominated by the space-charge-limited-current mechanism, irrespective of the film thickness.